Editorials from around New England

Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:

The Providence Journal (R.I.), Sept. 1, 2015

Ten years ago, the nation was transfixed by the unfolding disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Though the Category Five storm did not hit New Orleans directly, it weakened a poorly maintained system of levees, causing flooding that submerged four-fifths of the city. Several Mississippi Gulf Coast communities also met with destruction.

Few Americans will forget the thousands of people seen stranded at New Orleans’s Superdome, and the many more who survived in attics and on rooftops. Although the numbers remain uncertain, conservative estimates place the death toll from the storm at more than 900.

The disaster laid bare already existing problems in New Orleans, including incompetent local officials, a federal response that was initially less than dynamic, and a racial and social divide that, to an extent, still survives. Yet, amid all the finger pointing, thousands of volunteers streamed into New Orleans, doing what they could to lend a hand. It was a heartening demonstration of what Americans can accomplish, given the right inspiration.

In the decade since, the federal government and numerous private entities have poured billions of dollars into rebuilding. New Orleans became a laboratory for rethinking urban problems, and scored notable improvements as a result. The school system was extensively overhauled, and now consists largely of a network of charter schools; a modern medical complex was erected; public housing projects were replaced with attractive mixed-income units.

More than 100,000 people were able to rebuild dwellings through the Road Home program, cumbersome and ill-designed though it proved to be. And a vibrant new entrepreneurial class has brought a fresh can-do spirit to the city.

Yet, while New Orleans is in a much better position to address longstanding problems, it remains a work in progress. Poverty rates, previously high, remain about the same, and violent crime is a persistent problem. For many people, housing is unaffordable; sizable income disparities remain alive and well. Blacks, on average, continue to struggle much more than whites. By 2013, the city contained about 100,000 fewer black residents than it did before Katrina. The white population has declined slightly but is much wealthier than before.

The challenges ahead are much like those that face other medium-sized cities, including Providence. Among them are shifting away from a history of political corruption, reducing unemployment and diversifying an economy too reliant on tourism and other low-wage industries. Ten years from now, it would be nice to be able to say that New Orleans has not just survived; it has shown other cities how to thrive.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1JHWwIV

Kennebec Journal (Maine), Sept. 1, 2015

It’s hard to overestimate the power of marketing. The same magic that made a 10-cent cup of coffee with milk into something millions of Americans would gladly spend $5 for also has changed the way Americans think about water.

Buying water by the bottle used to be something for Europeans, who would swear by the health benefits of products associated with spas in the mountains. Americans were fine with soda pop.

Not any more. The average person in this country drinks 35 gallons of bottled water per year, more than twice the amount that people drank 15 years ago. According to a beverage industry trade group, it’s not a question of whether water will surpass soda as the No. 1 packaged beverage bought by consumers, but a question of when it will happen, with trends suggesting that it could be as soon as 2017.

This is good news from a public health perspective. Sugar-sweetened soda loaded up Americans, especially children, with thousands of empty calories. Added sugar in the American diet is not only bad for people’s teeth, it stresses their livers and is associated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer, and has no nutritional benefit at all. Some studies suggest it also prevents people from feeling sated, leading them to overeat.

Water, on the other hand, is the perfect way to quench your thirst, and is essential for survival. The news that Americans are drinking more water is good news, but there is one problem.

Bottled water might be good for you but not so good for the environment. It takes energy to manufacture the billions of bottles that Americans consume each year, and energy to truck them to market, adding to the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Many of the empties end up as litter and the ones that are thrown away fill landfills, especially in states that don’t have a deposit bottle law.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. The heavily regulated municipal water systems of the United States deliver potable water from taps in every state. All it takes is a little foresight to bring a refillable bottle with you and stay refreshed and healthy where ever you go.

Bottled water is not any better for you than tap water. In fact, some leading brands of bottled water are tap water. The only thing that separates the water that comes out of a plastic bottle from the kind that comes out of a kitchen sink is a name, a label and dedicated space in a vending machine or convenience store cooler.

So, while it’s excellent news to learn that Americans are reaching for water when they want a cold drink, it would be better still if they didn’t think that they are doing themselves any favors by drinking it from a disposable bottle.

Americans spend billions in tax money each year to ensure that water from municipal systems is safe to drink, and we shouldn’t let some slick marketing make us forget it.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1VDHucJ

Concord Monitor (N.H.), Sept. 4, 2015

If a liberal and a conservative sat down to discuss the science behind climate change, it’s not hard to guess which one of them might be skeptical of the data. But what if the conversation shifted to nuclear power plants or GMOs? Would the conservative still be less likely to trust the scientists?

The Carsey School of Public Policy at UNH set out to answer that very question in a study released this week, and the answer is a definitive yes. Regardless of whether the topic is climate change, genetically modified organisms, vaccines, evolution or nuclear power, liberals are significantly more likely to trust scientists.

Not surprisingly, the survey found that the ideological divide on climate science is greatest. Of the 2,841 respondents asked whether they trust scientists for information about climate change, 89 percent of those who identified themselves as liberal say they do, compared with just 34 percent of conservatives. The gaps on evolution (84 percent to 32 percent) and GMOs (73 percent to 31 percent) are wide as well. And while things tighten up a little bit when it comes to vaccines and nuclear power, liberals maintain an edge in the trust department. On vaccines, it’s 87 percent to 56 percent; on nuclear power, it’s 83 percent to 59 percent. For each question, moderates fall somewhere in the middle.

If you trust the work of researchers at the Carsey School, the study makes a compelling case for the existence of a clear split on the trustworthiness of scientists. What the numbers don’t reveal is why that divide exists.

But it could be that the science skeptics are a little bit like old baseball scouts.

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis introduced the world to Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and the methods he used to win despite having just a fraction of the financial resources of large-market teams. Over time, Beane had realized that relying solely on the biases and gut instincts of scouts to evaluate players was a mistake, an analog approach in a digital world. By placing a larger emphasis on analytics, Beane was able to fill the roster with undervalued players discarded by other general managers who trusted their eyes more than mathematical formulas. These days, most professional baseball teams use advanced metrics as a major part of player evaluation, but there are still some front offices and lots of fans who see data analysis as an assault on common sense. That is, they trust their notions of what a valuable player looks like more than they trust an equation that says otherwise.

So when a scientist presents data on global warming, the old scout might say, “It didn’t seem that warm to me when I was freezing my butt off in January.” When scientists say there’s no link between vaccines and autism, the old scout might say, “Then why weren’t there any cases of autism before we started sticking needles in babies?” On evolution, the old scout might see all the answers in the Bible and nothing but fantastic leaps in Darwin’s notebooks.

If you’re wondering why the ideological chasm in America is so large, a look at the Carsey School study is a good place to start. Conservatives and liberals are worlds apart not only on political philosophy, but the reliability of the data that frame debates. How can the nation reach anything resembling a consensus on immigration, health care, economic policy, terrorism, criminal justice, energy, etc., when so many choose to reject on principle the numbers meant to illuminate?

Science is the imperfect search for perfect truth. There are times when scientists arrive at theories and conclusions that turn out to be only partially correct or just plain wrong, but each failure in the lab is a step toward understanding. The old scouts are wise to review scientific data with healthy skepticism, but when that doubt becomes intellectual inflexibility, the march of human progress stalls - and all who inhabit the planet suffer for it.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1JFnmzm

Hartford Courant (Conn.), Sept. 4, 2015

Public officials, like all citizens, are expected to follow the law. In fact, they have a special obligation to do so. If they choose not to, they must expect consequences. Kim Davis can think about this as she sits in the pokey.

Ms. Davis is the Kentucky county clerk who was refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples; indeed, to all couples, gay and straight, since the U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this summer that same-sex couples have the right to marry. She is a conservative Christian and said it would violate her faith to put her name on a marriage license for two people of the same sex.

Several gay couples sued her. She was ordered by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning to begin issuing licenses this week. She defied his order. He had her jailed for contempt of court. He was right to do so.

Supporters praised her for standing up for her religious principles. That misses the point. She is a public official, being paid by the taxpayers to run her office in accordance with the law. If she could not in good conscience do that, her proper option was to resign and, if she wants, to advocate for a change in the law. To borrow an insight from Pope Francis, who is she to judge?

___

Online:

https://cour.at/1EFPp4E

Rutland Herald (Vt.), Sept. 3, 2015

The debate about immigration reached an Alice-in-Wonderland type of lunacy recently when Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said that a border wall separating the United States from Canada was worthy of consideration.

It may have escaped our notice, but maybe a secret army of Canadians has been smuggling Molson and Labatt’s across the border in their hockey bags. If the person in line next to you at the supermarket is acting with unusual courtesy, he may be an illegal Canadian. Left unanswered is Walker’s solution for the waters of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. The Floating Wall of Vermont?

It seems obvious that Walker is reacting, not to an actual peril du nord, but to the bigotry of Donald Trump, whose anti-immigrant bluster has spread fear and loathing within the Republican Party. Fear of immigrants is widespread - from the hustings of Iowa to the borders of Hungary to the Parliament of Great Britain. The Walkers and Trumps of the world are behaving as if all of these people - these desperate, uneducated, dangerous, swarthy masses - have nothing to do with us.

In fact, hysteria in America about immigrants from the south seems to be increasingly detached from reality. It turns out the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States is actually going down, not up. There are several reasons. One is that the lure of the United States grew weaker when the U.S. economy crumbled in 2008. Another is that the number of Mexicans in the demographic category most likely to immigrate - young men - is shrinking. The pressure to leave and the appeal of the United States have both diminished. Thus, the number of Mexicans living in the United States without proper documents fell by 1.1 million between 2007 and 2012.

There have been new waves of immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in recent years, but it is preposterous for Americans to pretend their arrival has nothing to do with us. Central America has been plagued by violence that is directly linked to the unrelenting hunger of Americans for drugs. The gang warfare wracking Mexico and Central America would not exist were it not for irresponsible and self-indulgent American behavior. The cycle of violence that young men are fleeing is intimately connected to the United States. We are in it together, and we reap what we sow.

Politicians in Britain and continental Europe are trying to fashion justifications for turning their backs on the millions of refugees fleeing to their shores as they seek to escape the wars in Syria and elsewhere. Thus, the open border policy of the European Union appears to be threatened by the need of fearful peoples to close doors against new arrivals.

But can the British really say that they have nothing to do with Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan? For one thing, the international boundaries defining the untenable nations of Syria and Iraq were drawn by the British among others about a century ago. Since then Britain has been among those nations that have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the consequences are actually threatening to touch Britain itself, Conservative politicians are saying, “Who, me?” and washing their hands of it.

Among European nations Germany has been the most welcoming of international refugees. Turkey has been shouldering an even more significant share of the number. There is no standing against the effects of cataclysmic change and human tragedy; there is only dealing with it.

If your idea of dealing with it is to build a wall, then you may be inclined, like Scott Walker, to see the need for walls at every border, even the border with Canada. Maybe Walker’s problem is that Wisconsin, though a northern state, does not actually share a border with Canada. Canada is there across the water of Lake Superior, but Wisconsin’s northern land borders are with Minnesota and Michigan. A land border with Canada might have shown him that a border can join two peoples, rather than divide them, the way that Vermonters are joined with their Quebecois neighbors, enhancing each, opening the doors for each to the other. We are the richer for it.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1imllkJ

The Republican (Mass.), Sept. 3, 2015

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all government shutdowns are created equal.

Though they may not seem to be each appears, at least on the surface, to be about a particular matter in a certain moment - each shutdown is at its core a political event seeking to achieve something that cannot be attained through the normal process.

But what comes out in the end is chaos.

Federal lawmakers returning to Capitol Hill after their annual August recess will have a lot of work ahead of them. There are important issues, both foreign and domestic, that will need to be addressed.

But for a certain crowd of conservatives, there’s another matter that’s been at the top of their agenda: shutting down the federal government. Yes, that old chestnut.

Some who are unhappy with Planned Parenthood, following the release of a number of “sting” videos showing employees discussing uses for tissue from aborted fetuses are looking at shutting down the government - ostensibly to keep the group from receiving federal funds.

But what they’d really be doing is trying to make a point. They believe they’ve been dealt a winning hand and intend to play it.

The “shutdown set” might wish to rethink that move. A recent poll from Quinnipiac University found that the GOP would largely be blamed for closing down the government, just as it was in 2013.

And though some have been arguing that Republican successes in the 2014 midterm elections show clearly that fallout from the shutdown was short-lived, they fail to note that the Republican Party received an enormous gift soon after the shutdown when the botched rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - Obamacare - put Democrats on the defensive and overshadowed all else.

But that’s not all. The fact is, shuttering the federal government as a way to deny funds to Planned Parenthood wouldn’t actually do much of anything to the organization’s finances.

A recent report by Politico cited a Congressional Research Service study showing that Planned Parenthood’s budget would be largely unchanged by a government shutdown.

But fanatics seldom let the facts stand in their way. As the old saying has it, when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1hIoJWt